Ed Jaffe posted a video... it seems he worked some magic on it so that it's only an excerpt from a longer presentation. It runs about 5 minutes, and it's well worth that. Frederick P. Brooks had many talents, one of which is he's an engaging and funny speaker.
The upshot (for our purposes) of his talk was that while they had a lot of smart people designing some smart languages, JCL somehow appeared without ever being planned or designed. He *emphatically* states it's "the worst language ever created, for any purpose, ever". Twice, if I counted correctly. Learning JCL is like learning Sheephead... at some point, you start to think people are just making sh*t up as they go along. Come to think of it, I think they probably did. I've probably said this before, but I like JCL too, it's an interesting puzzle-solving thing, like sudoku. But I never thought it was the "right" way to do it. sas On Mon, Jul 9, 2018 at 7:15 PM, Andrew Rowley <[email protected]> wrote: > On 9/07/2018 10:46 PM, Hobart Spitz wrote: > >> >> Basically, JCL is so far from real a programming language, that I can't >> describe it. >> >> That's because JCL isn't a programming language. There are plenty of > other languages that also suck as programming languages e.g. HTML, XML, > JSON, but that's not what they are supposed to be. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
